.. . . .. í. J:J ^ -- ). ,or .,..,.., .- ',' 4# * f\- . .. 128 T HE city of Reading, in south- eastern Pennsylvania, sits dream- ing and declining in the center of a lozenge-shaped county of bosomy farmland, Berks. The city's silhouette, in the shadow of Mount Penn, is domi- nated by the eighteen-story courthouse that rose from the red-brick surround in 1932 and remains the tallest build- ing in sight. Reading's population, once over a hundred thousand, has fallen in every census since 1930; its main stem, Penn Street, in my boyhood a thriving strip of stores and movie houses, sprouts lIke leaves of asphalt larger and larger parking lots in an attempt to lure shop- pers back downtown. Pretzels and steel are still produced, but the Old Reading Brewery is gone, the old farmers' mar- ket is gone, the textile industry has long gone south, and the Reading Railroad, well known to players of Monopoly, has gone in to the belly of Conrail. Even the Reading rackets, and the per- missive officials that let them flourish, are no longer notorious. Yet the eating " ^ . "'" .e' " . ..-.. i . \ dl " . "'1"-- ,. /i! ^' IJIÞ ^ < , 1 1; '" ; ...... , dd \ '" ':. BOOKS The Heaven of an Old Home is still good, and the predominantly German-descended population shows a sedentary loyalty to this comfortable, good-humored place. The people are both conservative and fanciful; hex signs adorn the Berk" barns, and a pa- goda surprisingly perches atop Mount Penn. Reading's civic institutions-the hospitals and schools, libraries and fire stations-are well equipped, and through the hazy summers and slushy winters a sort of cultural fever persists. Music stores and craft shops abound. Most children absorb a quota of im- proving lessons. Artists, if not as high in the social scale as ophthalmologists and firemen, have a certain place. But in the years when I was growing up around Reading the name of Wallace Stevens was never heard, and I had to go away to Harvard to discover that one of America's premier modern poets had been born and raised in the heart of the citv, on North Fifth Street. Stevens, too, went to Harvard, and after leaving it in 1 900 (without a de- \'. _____ L- '-" ?I I ^' " : , :: :!is ........ " 01 'f wt .* "I can't really tell you what business I'm in. I'm almost frighteningly diverszjied." gree) lived in New York and then in Hartford, first as a fledglIng newspa- perman, then as a law student, and finally as an executive for insurance companies. Resident in Hartford from 1 916 to his death in 1955, he came to be as automatically identified with Con- necticut as Robert Frost was with New Hampshire and Robinson Jeffers with the California coast. In the great and festive range of geographical references in his poetry, those to Berks County are perhaps pointedly few, and come in the later poems. N eversink, Schuylkill, Tulpehocken, and Oley appear in the collection "T ransport to Summer" (1947), but emblematically, as sites in Stevens' mInd: From a Schuylkill in mid-earth there came emergIng Flotillas, willed and wanted, bearing in them Shadows of friends, of those he knew. . . The Schuylkill, choked with coal silt in my day, did not even in Stevens' time bear flotillas of "canoes, a thousand thousand. " Like his alter ego Crispin in "The Comedian as the Letter C," Stevens "Slid from his continent by slow recess/To things within his actual eye." His Nature, so often and ardent- ly invoked, is generalized, Arcadian. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; S\\Teet berries ripen in the wilderness. . . In the slow and careful making of hIm- self as a poet (after college he did not publish any poems until he was thirty- five; his first collection, the revelatory "Harmonium," came out in 1923, when he was forty-four), Stevens had to put Reading far behind him, and he wrote, instead, of places-Florida, the Yucatán, an imagined Orient-where he had never, or passingly, been. Yet the Stevens family were solid Reading- ites ; Wallace's father, Garrett, came there in 1870 to take up the law, and his two other sons, Garrett, Jr., and ] ohn, were practicing attorneys in Reading, as is John's son John now. Wallace lived in the same brick row house, 323 North Fifth Street, for his first eighteen years, and except for sum- mer excursions spent all those forma- tive years there. So Stevens' daughter Holly has performed a valuable as well as filial service by recounting and as- sembling what she can discover about her father before, as a rising business-